Nick McCabe to appear on Twilight Singers album

With the start of his first-ever solo tour looming on Oct. 8, Greg Dulli has finished work on the fifth Twilight Singers album, the long-awaited follow-up to 2006's "Powder Burns," which is due out in early 2011.

Dulli says that Twilight watchers should be braced for some new sonic adventures this time out. "If you've ever liked me before, you're going to love half of this, and the other half of this you're gonna go, 'What the f**k?!' " Dulli tells Billboard.com. "But you may love that, too. That's the part I love the most, the 'What the f**k?!' part."

Dulli describes the album, which he recorded primarily in California -- Joshua Tree, Arcadia and Hollywood -- with some work in New Orleans, where he also resides, as "a trippy record. It's 43 minutes long and it's pieced together very painstakingly, and there's plenty of crossfades and headphone magic for your trouble. I allowed some influences in that I haven't exactly let in before." Dulli says he wrote "at least two hours or so" of music for the collection, though three of the 11 tracks "came at the last minute...I was still doing an edit in the mastering suite. It went right down to the last tick of the clock."

Dulli produced the album with a variety of his regular studio collaborators, while more than two dozen musicians play on the set -- including his Gutter Twins partner Mark Lanegan, Ani DiFranco, Joseph Arthur, Petra Haden and the Verve's guitarist Nick McCabe. He plans to take the Twilight Singers on tour in February or March, but he's also worked up four of the album's songs to play on his An Evening with Greg Dulli tour, which kicks off in New Orleans and includes shows in the U.S. and Europe through mid-November.

Dulli says he and his accompanists -- Twilight Singers guitarist Dave Rosser and Polyphonic Spree multi-instrumentalist Rick Nelson -- plan to work up 30-35 songs for the outing so they can "flip the set every night, which will be cool." He promises there will be "at least one song from every record I've made" and adds that many of them will be "songs I never played before, just for whatever reasons." He's keeping the specific choices secret for now, though; "No one needs to know 'til I play them in New Orleans that night -- and then they'll be on YouTube an hour later."

Dulli plans to film his shows on Oct. 20 in Philadelphia and Nov. 17 in San Francisco but isn't sure what he'll do with the footage yet. "I'm a fairly private dude," he explains, "so I love watching other people's stuff, but my own makes my skin crawl." Dulli's next project will likely be an instrumental album, and he'll also slated to guest on the next album by McCabe's band the Black Ships.